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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: occurs much oftener without complication than without the evidence of direct symptoms. Fractures of the base were for a long time regarded as shrouded in mystery, and, like the intracranial traumata, as problems to be satisfactorily solved only by necropsic examination. The means afforded for their diagnosis are certainly not unusually restricted; the possibility of tracing the fissure from its origin in the vault, the evidence of external hemorrhages, serous discharges, or extrusions of brain tissue, the localization of pain, and the concurrence of complicating intracranial lesions, suffice in by far the larger number of cases to remove them from the domain of obscurity and conjecture. Prognosis. The prognosis of cranial fracture demands some consideration. It concerns repair, the loss of function, and by a possibility the danger to life. The restoration of the bone in simple linear fracture is effected by a definitive callus and is perfect; even a trace of its existence is eventually discoverable in only the most exceptional instances. At the base, in which fracture is almost invariably of this form when propagated from the vault, and in which frequency of occurrence and of recovery would presuppose frequency of disclosure in the dead- house if evidence of closed fissures remained, it is practically unknown as an ancient lesion. A cranium discovered and lost in the morgue of Bellevue Hospital many years ago, by a youth ignorant of its pathological value, exhibited a line of fracture across both middle fossae with slight displacement of the posterior segment upward, and withunion long perfected. This specimen was perhaps unique. If the fissure is widely opened and the patient survives the complications with which it is likely to be attended, it will be approximately c…
Traumatic injuries of the brain and its membranes
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